A New Approach to Modeling Water Balance in Nile River Basin, Africa

Abstract

Abstract:The demand for calculating and mapping water yield is increasing for inaccessible locations or areas of conflict to support decision makers. Integrated Valuation of Environmental Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST) was applied to simulate basin hydrology. InVEST is becoming popular in the water modeling community due to its low requirements for input information, level of skill and model setup is available to the public domain. Estimation and mapping of water production, evapotranspiration and precipitation of the Nile River Basin have been performed by using open access data. This study utilized climate, soil and land use related data to model the key components of the water balance in the study region. Maps of the key parts of water balance were also produced. The spatial patterns of precipitation, actual evapotranspiration and water yield show sharp decline from south to northern part of the study basin while actual evapotranspiration fraction happens to the opposite. Our analysis confirms the ability of the InVEST water yield model to estimate water production capacity of a different part of a basin without flow meters.

Partitioning the impacts of land use/land cover change and climate variability on water supply over the source region of the Blue Nile Basin

“…As far as data for validation is available, result validation also increases the trustworthiness of the research findings for practical use. Unlike numerous hydrological models where both calibration of the model and validation of the result are difficult and uncertain, InVEST model calibration and validation is simple, straight forward, and impartial (Belete et al, ). We delineated Ribb sub‐watershed above Ribb stream gauge and Gummara sub‐watershed above Gummara stream gauge, where actual flow measurement has been taken place, for calibration and validation purposes.…”

“…These drawbacks are attributed to a lack of ground data for model calibration and result validation in Upper Nile subBasin. However, the introduction of simple, easy to use, and low input data requirements for models such as the Integrated Valuation of Environmental Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST) annual water yield model makes accurate hydrological modeling possible in data-scarce regions (Belete et al, 2018;Hamel & Guswa, 2015). Hence, water supply change can be quantified using the InVEST annual water yield model in data-scare regions (Sharp et al, 2018;Vogl et al, 2015).…”

Estimation of water yield in the hydrographic basins of southern Ecuador

“…This model estimates annual average run-off at the pixel, sub-basin, and basin level, considering variables such as precipitation, reference evapotranspiration, land use and cover, soil depth, and available water content for plants. The InVEST water yield model has been widely used throughout the world with satisfactory results in China (e.g., Bai et al, 2012;Geng et al, 2015;Lang et al, 2017;Li et al, 2018;Zhang et al, 2012), Thailand ( e.g., Arunyawat and Shrestha, 2016), Spain ( e.g., Bangash et al, 2013), Argentina ( e.g., Gaspari et al, 2015;Izquierdo and Clark, 2012), and several countries in northeastern Africa ( e.g., Belete et al, 2018). Other studies such as those of Sánchez-Canales et al (2012), Hamel and Guswa (2015), and Redhead et al Hydrol.…”

Land Use/Land Cover Changes and Associated Impacts on Water Yield Availability and Variations in the Mereb‐Gash River Basin in the Horn of Africa

“…For instance, it was 458 million m 3 in 2015, and this result closely matches with a long‐term stream runoff measurement in the same basin at Kassala, which was 430 Million m 3 (Zerai, 1996). The total water yield of the whole basin is also proportional to its total area in the overall water balance estimation made for Tekeze Atbara Catchment (12.87 Billion m 3 /year) as part of the Nile River Basin (Belete et al, 2018).…”